Abandoned Prayers (34 page)

Her sister, however, told Weaver that she should have said something.

“They probably already know,” Weaver replied. “If they’re gonna find out about it, it ain’t gonna be from me.”

When Cutler left he wasn’t sure what he really had. Stutzman had made one statement, though, that did seem to have some importance: that it was “pretty obvious” that Pritchett had been “murdered with my gun.”

Who was the attorney Stutzman kept mentioning in his conversation with Weaver?

A couple days later, “Junior” called the Pizza Hut. He told Weaver that he was going to send Hunter over to pick up his TV and mantel clock. This terrified Weaver, who felt that things were getting out of control and that she was sinking deeper into this murder case than she wanted.
Send someone to my house!
Even having some killer’s friend know where she lived was out of the question. She told all the workers at the Pizza Hut not to give out her address to anyone for any reason.

Every time Stutzman called, she had to sit down and drink a coke. She would shake all over.
What am I gonna do? He’s gonna send someone to get that damn TV? How do I get out of this?

The only answer was to lie.

“Listen, Eli,” she finally said, “somebody came to my house. I was scared and I gave the TV to him.”

“Who was it?” Stutzman asked.

“I don’t know. The cops have been coming around too. I don’t think you should call me again.”

“You didn’t give anybody this number?”

“No.”

“Don’t,” he pleaded.

She hung up and never heard from Eli Stutzman again. When Weaver saw Cutler she told him that she hadn’t heard from Stutzman since the call she had taped.

She figured it was safer reading and writing about murder than being involved in a case.

Sam Miller had hightailed it home to Ohio and enlisted in the navy. He kept his mouth shut about what Stutzman had told him in the truck on the way back to Banton Road.

He figured he’d live longer.

Stutzman made a call to Cal Hunter at his mother’s house in San Antonio, wanting more help from his business partner.

“He wanted me to get some things out of his safe deposit box. I told him to forget it. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t want to get mixed up with the law. The police had told me they wanted Stutzman. Getting involved in murder was the last thing on my mind,” Hunter said.

On July 5, 1985, Stutzman signed guardianship papers for Dean and Margie Barlow to administer medicine in case Danny became sick while he was away. He also signed two checks over to the Barlows to use for the boy’s support. He told them that an employee of his had been murdered in Texas and that he knew who had done it and was going to track the killer himself.

After leaving Danny with the Barlows, Stutzman resurfaced at the Greyhound bus station in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ted Truitt, the young dairy farmer who had lost his virginity to Stutzman in January 1983, was there to meet him. Stutzman was traveling light, carrying only the gym bags Denny Ruston had given him the night he fled from Austin.

Truitt had been looking forward to seeing his friend since the phone call in April.

“I’m going to be taking a little vacation,” Stutzman had told him then, though he was vague about when it would be. Almost immediately Truitt knew this was going to be no ordinary visit.

Stutzman told Truitt he was involved in a murder investigation in Austin.

“One of my crew was murdered. The police questioned me about the murder. I told them I knew who did it—a guy who worked for me, but I fired him.”

“Did the police get the guy?” Truitt asked.

“No. They didn’t even try. I have to go get him myself. He’s in Ohio,” Stutzman said.

Truitt thought Stutzman was lying. It was obvious that he had left Austin with only what he could carry in his two arms. Even his gun rack and rocker and other furniture—things he had said he’d made himself—had been left behind. Stutzman had seemed so proud of his things that he would never abandon them.

Eli Stutzman had come to the little town outside of Fort Wayne to hide out, and Truitt didn’t like it.

A lot of what Stutzman said seemed out of synch. He told Truitt that he had been driving up from Texas with a friend and that, when the police had pulled their car over to the side of the road, for some reason the friend had run away.

The story was disjointed and convoluted. Truitt didn’t ask any follow-up questions. He didn’t know where to begin.

Stutzman indicated that gay sex might have been involved in the crew member’s murder, though he did not say if the man and he were lovers. He also said that he had been questioned by the police and singled out as a suspect, when, in fact, he’d had nothing to do with the murder. “But I know who the killer is,” he repeated.

Stutzman later said that the victim had been working for him and that he was keeping his money in a savings account so that his ex-wife couldn’t get her hands on it. He added that one night a friend had gone into Stutzman’s house and been met by cops with drawn guns. The friend had been very scared when he called Eli.

It was as if Eli Stutzman were the writer, producer, and
director of a bad television show, with Truitt the captive audience.

Stutzman said his attorney had advised him to lay low for a while until the smoke cleared back in Texas. Truitt figured Eli should have turned himself in to the police, especially if he was innocent.
I have a killer in the house
, he thought.

“Eli had changed. Something about his eyes wasn’t the same—there was a coldness, a distance. His eyes were mad looking,” Truitt later said.

Stutzman also looked sick. Red blotches mottled his body. He complained that the rash was itchy, even painful. At first, Truitt thought it was scabies, but Stutzman said it couldn’t be. Truitt took him to his doctor.

Later, when Truitt snooped around Stutzman’s things, he discovered that the medication Stutzman had been prescribed was indeed for scabies.

Several times through the summer, Truitt went down to the farm to call a friend of his in Newcomerstown, Ohio. Truitt was convinced that Stutzman was a killer, and the friend concurred. The word among the Amish was that Sam Miller had stumbled on a murder in Texas.

Truitt told his friend that Eli Stutzman had said the killer was now in Ohio, and that he was headed there to find him. The prospect was not a good one.

“Whatever you do,” the man told Truitt, “keep him away from here. I don’t want to run into him in Newcomers-town.”

Truitt said he would do his best. The problem was, he wanted Stutzman to leave Indiana—even the fugitive’s phone calls were getting to him.

Once, when he answered the phone, the caller, a woman, asked for “Junior.”

“There’s no Junior here—” Truitt began, but Stutzman cut in.

“Oh, that call’s for me.
I’m
Junior,” he said, taking the phone.

That was news to Truitt, who had never known anyone
to call Stutzman by that nickname. Stutzman offered no explanation, and Truitt didn’t want to know about it anyway. He felt as if he already knew too much.

“I felt that at any moment the police were going to bust in and cause a scene. It was the last thing I needed,” he later said.

Another caller, this time a man, asked for “Junior.” Stutzman was weeding the garden when Truitt answered the call.

“Look,” Truitt told the man, “this guy’s name is not Junior. He’s wanted for murder, and if you are looking for a time and place to meet him I suggest you give it up.”

The caller was surprised, but didn’t believe Truitt.

“I still want to talk to him.”

Truitt couldn’t believe it.
What is with these people anyway?

Truitt noticed that Stutzman always knew when the mail carrier was coming and that many times there were things for him; more often, he had mail that needed to be sent out.

He must be looking to meet more tricks
, Truitt thought.

One time Stutzman had Truitt drive him over to the Western Union office in Auburn, Indiana, to pick up some money he’d had wired to him.

“It’s money from the ranch in Colorado,” Stutzman said.

The news about the murder in Texas reached the Gingeriches in the Beaverton, Michigan, settlement. They wrote to Stutzman the first week in July, but their letter was returned. The Gingeriches were beside themselves with concern for Danny, so on August 21, 1985, Amos wrote to the Austin Police Department.

. . . we would very much like to come in contact with our grandson Danny which is Eli’s son. We hear rumors that Eli is in trouble with the law . . .

A week later, Sergeant Al Herson of the Austin Police Department’s missing persons section sent back the following reply:

It is true your son-in-law is in some trouble with the law. Your grandson is with his father and I am not able to divulge his whereabouts at this time. He is no longer in the state of Texas. My information indicates Danny is okay and he is with his father . . .

Herson was technically correct that he couldn’t divulge Stutzman’s whereabouts due to privacy laws. In fact, however, no one in either Austin or Travis County law enforcement knew where Eli Stutzman was—they had lost track of him in July.

Meanwhile, Stutzman had taken a break from Truitt’s farm, a great relief to the Indiana man, and gone into Ohio, where he signed up for a new driver’s license and fabricated a new middle initial and birth date.

Stutzman returned to Aztec, with his scabies cleared up, a new social security card, a new name.
A new man
. Yet he still had the same old problem—Danny. He planned to leave the boy in Wyoming until he had gotten back on his feet again and put Pritchett’s murder behind him once and for all.

Eli moved into the trailer house on Chuck Freeman’s six-hundred-acre ranch near Dutchman’s Hill, in Aztec, New Mexico. He worked on the so-called Breakaday Ranch—“Either we start at the break of day or we break something everyday”—for five dollars an hour, painting, pouring cement, and putting up rails.

Whenever he called Danny, it was from the back bedroom. On September 7, two days before Danny turned nine, he spoke with someone at the Barlows’ number for thirty-one minutes.

The next day, Stutzman dispatched a letter to the Gingeriches. He and Danny, he said, had returned from a two-month vacation—having moved back to New Mexico on June 15. He claimed that Danny had spent July and August in a children’s summer camp—“He chose to go to this camp instead of traveling.”

The truth was that Danny had been abandoned by his father.

Danny said he enjoys school here more than in Texas. School started Sept. 3. He is getting tall, hard to keep in clothes. He had his 9th birthday yesterday.

In desperation Amos Gingerich wrote to the Austin police again.
Would they help find Danny now?

Just before Halloween, Dean Barlow and another man—a live-in friend, as he later described the man to police—dropped Danny off at Breakaday Ranch on the way to the American Poultry Show in Albuquerque. Barlow had packed the boy’s belongings in a box, believing the stay was going to be permanent.

Stutzman, naturally, had other plans.

Danny played on the farm, and Stutzman had him take pictures of him for his ads, including a shot of his Levi’s-clad backside. It wasn’t likely that taking such a photo mattered much to the boy. Neither was it likely that the boy didn’t know why his father wanted a “butt shot.” By 9 years of age, Danny had seen it all. Those who saw him a month before his death felt that the boy was showing signs of emotional wear and tear. Danny, according to the ranch foreman, Byron Larson, was “in his own little world.”

Freeman saw different behavior.

“That kid couldn’t sit still. He was always trashing things, cutting up the garbage cans and breaking eggs in the henhouse.”

When Barlow returned from the chicken show, Stutzman told him to take Danny back to Wyoming.

“My roommate is an alcoholic—this isn’t a good place for the boy to be,” Stutzman said.

Later, Barlow told police, “Danny cried all the way to Mesa Verde. He really missed his dad.”

Stutzman’s excuse was lame, if indeed that had been the excuse he gave to the Wyoming man. It was true that his roommate drank some, but he hardly posed a threat to the child’s safety. Further, Danny had been in and out of situations far more unsettling ever since his father had left the Amish.

Perhaps Stutzman didn’t want the boy around because he got in the way of his fun—though even that hadn’t been a problem in the past. Regardless of the truth, however, Stutzman still projected the image of the model father.

On November 4, he mailed a letter to the Gingeriches. An obvious forgery, the letter was a deliberate attempt to mislead the Amish about Danny’s whereabouts. Stutzman double-spaced on notebook paper and made a couple of errors with letter spacing to make the writing look childlike. He even misspelled
week
as
weed
.

Dear Susie

How are you? Dad and I are fine. The weather here is not very cold. I like school. I play soccer in school. My team won second place. I got my report card this weed. I got good grades. I am in third grade.
Love, Danny

The Gingeriches wondered if “Danny’s” letter had been in answer to their contact with the Austin police. But if Stutzman had sent the letter to stop them from looking for their grandson, he had miscalculated.

The Eli Stutzman they knew had forged notes before—at Stoll Farms in Marshallville and at Keim’s farm in Apple Creek. They didn’t know that Stutzman had been lying when he claimed that Danny was with him in Georgia when he had actually left the little boy with cousin Abe Stutzman.

With the Texas murder on his mind, Stutzman became increasingly irritable—he was no longer the easygoing man
he had been before the trouble in Austin. He still went to parties, however, wearing his Amish clothes if a costume was needed. Friends knew that no matter what preoccupied him, Stutzman would always have time for sex and dope.

Late one cold, fall night Kenny Hankins and Eli Stutzman were among a group partying at the Diamond Belle Saloon, at the Strater Hotel in Durango. Stutzman bristled when David Tyler approached their table.